Unmanned vessels, such as vehicles like cars and trucks, and aerial ones like drones, are dependent on connectivity primarily for monitoring and control. A type of unmanned aerial vehicle, autonomous vehicles moving over large distances are, even if they manage basic mobility, dependent on cellular access for security, remote control purposes and to continuously transfer recorded data, e.g. locations, status of engine and/or battery, images or video, to some central location.
One particularly interesting group of such vehicles is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). There is a growing interest for UAVs like from high-profile business cases—such as for delivery of consumer products, such as books, gadgets and soft drinks and even hot food like pizza. However, there are also everyday use cases that extend from filmmaking and aerial photography to fields such as real estate, farming and pipeline maintenance. Journalists want to work with them. As do meteorologists. Also, consumers may use UAVs to take amazing vacation pictures.
State of the art manually operated drones like Parrot Bebop or Phantom Dji 2 Vision have a range of 400 m to 2 km (Open Area). This makes it impossible for one operator to remotely control more than one drone at the time and the range is limited to the range of the radio transmitter.
Multiple drones moving over larger areas with the purpose of delivery services will be dependent on wide area radio access for security, safety and remote operation purposes. The drone will thus carry a wireless transceiver that is carried through the coverage area of a wireless communication network.
Such moving wireless transceivers that provide services live video and metadata, to for instance a remote operations centre, for the applications related to agriculture, public safety, oil and gas exploration, etc., may put high requirements on the radio network performance of the wireless communication network.
In a scenario where a moving wireless transceiver passes through a cell of the wireless communication network during which it transmits, e.g. high definition real time video, the wireless transceiver will put significant load onto the cell at question. If the cell already before entrance of the wireless transceiver is highly loaded, both radio network key performance indexes (KPIs) and a video quality measure of the video will suffer.
In a further scenario where a multitude of moving wireless transceivers supplying high-definition-video frequently pass through a cell, that content traffic itself can deplete a large portion of the cellular capacity in a given area.
It would therefore be suitable if a vessel carrying a wireless transceiver could adapt its mission path with respect not only to the fulfilling of the service KPI, but also to avoid burdening a part of the wireless communication network already having a high load.